


it never really mattered anyhow

by mxingno



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Unresolved Emotional Tension, post-12x10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 22:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10228535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mxingno/pseuds/mxingno
Summary: Dennis tries, and fails, to follow through.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The season finale very slightly ruined my life. This is me attempting to exorcise it from my brain. Please watch out for canon-typical misogyny.
> 
> (The title is from 'Malevolent Seascape Y' by the Extra Glenns, because I think I'm funny.)

She opens the door to her hotel room, the kid balanced on her hip, and her expression does something that is definitely not good. “Oh,” she says, like she’s not even surprised; she’s just disappointed. She’s gotta be great at being a mom. “You’re back.”

“Yeah,” he says, and swallows what little spit is left in his mouth. “Yeah. Uh -- Mandy. Mandy, listen.”

Mandy frowns. Not angry. She doesn’t even know his name, not for sure; she has no goddamn right to look at him like she knows him. Dennis takes a breath. It’s fine. It’s gonna be fine. He’s doing the right thing, that has to count for something. “Listen,” he says again, and waits for inspiration to strike. “I, uh -- I screwed up. Big time. I think that I just didn’t… didn’t _understand,_ you know? Until you’re -- you’re there, and you’re holding your son, and it’s all… you know, it’s something _real,_ for the first time in your whole life you made something real happen… I didn’t get it before, Mandy. I was dumb. Okay? I was an idiot. That’s on me.”

She nods, almost sympathetically. His heart’s hammering in his throat; it takes him a second to realise that he ought to be mad at her for that.

“That’s on me,” he repeats. He’s got this. “But I get it now. All right? I held this, uh, this little guy in that alley and it was real, you know? It was… it was the realest goddamn thing I ever did.”

Brian Junior is watching him with wide, round eyes. They’re sort of too big for his face, actually. He sure as hell didn’t inherit that from Dennis.

“Okay,” says Mandy, patiently. “So… first you lie to me, and you tell me that you and your roommate are in some sort of -- well, I don’t know what it is, exactly, but it sure is something. Then your friend offers to pay me to have sex with him. And then you _fake your own death._ And then you come here, and you try to tell me that you’re -- you’re some sort of changed man?”

Dennis is in suspended animation; Dennis is watching his life pass him by on a vast and impassable screen. “Yeah,” he says, and something in it sounds hollow. “That’s where we’re at, yeah, it’s -- it’s pretty much exactly what happened.”

“The problem,” she says, “or, well, one problem, out of a whole lotta problems, is that I don’t even know who you changed _from?”_

“Ah.” Dennis is hearing himself speak through dead air and static. “Yeah, that would… I see that.”

He doesn’t know what the hell his face is doing. He’s not even that drunk. Mandy is looking at him like she feels sorry for him and he’s going to choke on it, he’s going to die of this tedious bitch from the middle of goddamn nowhere and her totally inexplicable pity. “Look,” she offers. It’s like she’s talking to a kid. “It’s sweet, I guess, that you wanna be part of Junior’s life now. And if you’re really serious about it, we can stay in touch for sure. But you’re not ready for this. Heck, I’m not sure _I’d_ be ready for raising a child with you. You gotta commit to this stuff, you know? You gotta -- really _want_ it. And I’m sorry if I seem a little harsh here, but… well, I’m just not sure that you do.”

He’s staring at her, and it’s probably creepy. It’s that goddamn interrogation-room footage all over again. She’s got lines around her eyes and her mouth, and her hair is messy and dry as shit, and Brian Junior shouldn’t even be called Brian Junior, not really. He should be Dennis Junior, except that was the dog, and he ate the dog after they starved it to death in their kitchen. There’s something sticky on his face. Food, maybe. What do kids even eat, when they’re that small? Dennis doesn’t even know. Frank wouldn’t know, either. Maybe it just runs in the fucking family.

“Okay,” he says, and rubs the back of his neck until his skin stops prickling. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Listen,” she says, and takes a delicate step closer, over the threshold of her room. “You did a… a pretty difficult thing, coming back here. I get that. Just look after yourself, all right? Whatever your name really is.”

“Dennis,” he says, clumsily, like he’s only just learned how to speak. “My, uh. My name is Dennis.”

* * *

“You blew up my goddamn car,” he says, because he’s just a broken record now, apparently. There’s a needle trapped in a scratch that shouldn’t even exist, not in him. “Jesus _fucking_ Christ, Mac, I was going to drive Mandy to the airport -- I had to put her in a goddamn cab, which I couldn’t afford, by the way--”

“But you could _totally_ have paid for plane tickets,” snaps Mac. Like he has any right to snap. There’s still no bed in his bedroom, just the goddamn dildo bike and way too many cast-off shirts. He could’ve had a bed in North Dakota. A bed all to himself, without some asshole trying to steal all the sheets in the middle of the goddamn night. “You’re unbelievable, Dennis. We put all that work into trying to get you out of your stupid kid situation, and you just turn around like you’re gonna--”

“What?” he says. Yells. Whatever. The upstairs neighbours are already hammering on the ceiling; it’s just like old times. “Do something _real_ with my life? Get out of that -- that goddamn shithole of a bar before it eats me alive?”

Mac laughs, too loud, too high. “Wow. Wow, okay. I get it. Your baby mama doesn’t want you, so you think you can just waltz back into the apartment and take it all out on me -- when you still haven’t thanked me for getting us the apartment back? You’re a piece of shit, Dennis.”

“I could go anyway,” he snarls, like he believes what he’s saying. His skin is going to rip apart with all the rage it’s trying to contain; he is an ocean, he is a god, he is shaking where he stands like his legs can’t hold him up. “You think I’d give up on this just because I got a no? I’m gonna buy another plane ticket. I’ll take the goddamn bus to the airport, okay -- is that what you wanna hear? You can keep right on trashing my stuff if you want -- I mean, shit, just go ahead and set the apartment on fire again, get out the RPG and go to town, I can rent a place out west just fine. It’s not gonna stop me. You can’t stop me.”

Mac throws his arms wide, like Christ on the cross, if Christ had literally ever worn a goddamn Tommy Bahama shirt. “Am I stopping you?”

“Are you goddamn kidding me?” His throat hurts. The neighbours are still hammering away. “The last time you couldn’t get in touch with me you called the fucking cops.”

“Yeah, well,” snaps Mac, “you cried like a _bitch_ when I bought you that RPG, if you really wanna come at me--”

“I absolutely did _not_ cry and any of the others will tell you the same--”

“Admit it, Dennis.” Mac jabs a finger at him like he wishes it were a knife. His voice is louder than Dennis’s, suddenly. “Admit that it meant something to you.”

The gut-instinct denial sticks in his throat. He opens his mouth to say it and nothing comes; he’s just some asshole standing slackjawed and dumb, nothing to offer. All at once, he is unbearably goddamn tired.

“I can’t talk to you,” he says, dully. It’s meant to be more righteous than this. He was trying, that’s the worst part of the whole stupid situation; he was _trying_ to do the right thing. “I’m going to bed. And I’m not sleeping with the dildo bike, so just -- you know what, just do what you want. I don’t give a shit anyway.”

His bedroom is his bedroom again, right down to the last exacting detail. All that’s missing is the cameras. Nobody is watching as he throws his shirt on the floor like a savage, as he walks straight past his makeup wipes to the mattress. It’s fine. It’s not real if there’s nobody there to see it. He’ll be a person again in the morning, one way or the other. He’ll go back to the bar and they won’t talk about it and somehow, no matter what nature dictates should happen between them, it will all be normal again. The laws of nature don’t apply to the gang. Dennis curls up tight, tight on his side.

Mac shows up maybe half an hour later, closing the door quietly behind him. It’s just more pity, creeping about, playing along with the fiction that Dennis can sleep. He curves his body to fit Dennis’s back like he’s trying to prove a point -- that they belong like this, or that they were never built for anything more. It doesn’t matter. They’re a double lock, like this, an impenetrable thing that the rest of the gang can’t crack. Things will be normal, one way or another, in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> I am on tumblr at [mxingno](http://mxingno.tumblr.com), and if you have thoughts about these bad people then I probably want to hear them.


End file.
